MUSIC THEORY

The Anatomy
Music Theory and Performance has been created for students who are interested in further exploration of music principles and practice. The purpose of this class is to acquaint students with the fundamentals of music and to help them pursue music performance with a deeper appreciation of the craft. Music Theory and Performance requires hard work, discipline, mental agility, patience, and time. You will spend the rest of your life making sense of the material you will get here… enjoy, work hard, and be good.

Part I. Fundamentals
• The Basic Language of Music: Staff, treble and bass clefs; reading the dots.
• Sound in Time: Tempo, meter, rhythm, note and rest values. Sight singing and sight ta-taing.
• Chromatic Scale: The 12 notes, sharps, flats, naturals.
• Intervals: Recognition, consonance and dissonance.
• The Major Scale: Tetrachords; formation and structure; names of scale degrees.
• The Minor Scale: formation and structure of the minor scale in all its three forms; relative and parallel keys.
• Key Signatures and the Circle of Fifths: Degrees of Kinship.
• Chord Construction and Diatonic Triads: major, minor, diminished, augmented.
• Chord Inversions. Reading figured bass.

Part II. Introduction to Harmony
• Chord Voicings and Chord Patterns: Cadences, voice-leading : Principles of melodic writing; types of motion.
• Primary Harmonies: Tonic, dominant, subdominant; construction, connection, voice-leading.
• Inverted Triads: Construction, voicing, applications; first and second inversion triads in contextual usage.
• The Dominant Seventh: Derivation, construction, applications, variants, and inversions.
• Secondary Harmonies: Mediant, submediant, supertonic; function and applications; the “Clock of Tonality”.
• The Cadence: Types of cadences, contextual usage, possibilities in and beyond traditional practice.
• Non-Chord Tones I: Passing tones, neighboring tones; melodic developments within a harmonic framework; linear dissonance.
• Non-Chord Tones II: Suspensions, anticipations; temporal dissonances; rhythmic/ melodic independence in context.
• Modulation I: Pivot - chord modulation; access of closely related tonalities.
• Modulation II: Secondary dominants; usage in formal modulation as well as in local harmonic events.
• Modulation III: Borrowed chords, extended alteration; direct modulation.
• Scale Tendencies, Modes, and Intervals: (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian.

Part III. Rhythmic Workshop
• The Basic Language of Music: Staff, treble and bass clefs; reading the dots.
• Sound in Time: Tempo, meter, rhythm, note and rest values.
• Time Signatures: Simple, Compound, Asymmetric meters.
• Conducting Patterns:. 2, 3/4, 4/4, 5, 6/8, 7.

Part IV. Ear Training and Sight Singing
• Rhythmic Sight-Reading: Ta –taing and conducting.
• Aural Development: Interval and sonority recognition; transcribing melodies and rhythms.
• Transcription and “Chordal” Analysis of Works: Using outer voices and Roman . numeral systems.

Evaluation and Grading

• Attendance / Participation 25%
• Homework / Quizzes (5 total) 25%
• Final Project and Performance 25%
• Final Theory Exam * 25%